You know how other people's children always get older faster than you think they ought to? Will it surprise you to learn that the youngest Gladlys are not actually very young these days? Pete is heading off to college next month (next! month!) and Stella will go to high school.
This means I'm done guiding kids through junior high.
Junior high was not an especially pleasant season for any of the kids, but the last round was the hardest. Some of the issue was that online learning was never going to improve the sixth-grade experience. All of the social stuff that the grownups were sorting out over Zoom, which some of us found anxiety-inducing even with our adult self-regulation skills ("did she mean to sound so passive-aggressive or am I being overly sensitive?"), was No Fun for the junior high kids who were wading through it at the same time. It is hard enough to read facial cues when you are first learning how to do sarcasm; masks only made it more complicated.
Junior high girls are strange and mercurial specimens. Sometimes in seasons past I would listen to the bigger kids talking to their friends and think to myself, "Junior high boys are weird," but I have realized afresh that junior high girls are plenty weird. It's just a more familiar flavor of weirdness.
In hindsight I have to say it was EXHAUSTING. So much to process! So many people who forgot or disregarded or hadn't yet developed their filters! They would just let their thought-bubble thoughts morph into speech-bubble thoughts, spewing them out into the world to spread unhappiness.
I can accept that it is perfectly normal for junior high kids to be figuring out what is funny and what is mean, what is edgy and what is just unacceptable, who's a slightly quirky friend and who's a best-avoided menace. Doesn't mean I have to like it, though.
Let us all hope that high school will be a little smoother, shall we?
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